The oilfield services industry is complex. Managing personnel, equipment, monitoring processes, and logistics poses daily challenges. Operational inefficiency, maintenance needs, remote environments, and safety issues affect profit margins, waste resources and money, lead to employee burnout, and cause safety hazards. Oilfield tank monitoring can help reduce the various difficulties that threaten company earnings.
Field operations are the first step in oilfield monitoring. They determine whether oil fields are productive, safe, and worth investing in. Every aspect of oilfield operations has stages that require careful monitoring and management. The essential stages are exploration, drilling, production, processing, and transportation. Missing these creates obstacles in oil tank management.
Exploration
Hydrocarbons are compounds of hydrogen and carbon bonds. Hydrocarbon levels in rock and seabed craters indicate the presence of oil. During the exploration phase, workers use crude oil analyzers to assess quality. They also monitor the oil’s chemical composition, such as sulfur content; its physical properties, such as density; and its hydrocarbon levels. Consistent sulfur content, density, and hydrocarbon levels point to viable oil wells.
Drilling
Drilling monitoring is a continuous flow of information from downhole sensors and equipment. The information includes critical data about rig performance. For example, monitoring tracks the rate of drill penetration (ROP) into rock formations. Rate of drill penetration means how far the drill bores into rock. Monitoring and tracking ROP helps workers evaluate drill effectiveness.
Production
During oil production, safety issues may arise. Monitoring tracks pressure, toxic gases, and equipment maintenance. An example is wellbore stability issues. The interaction between the drilling fluid and rock formations should be stable. Wellbore monitoring can track whether drilled well surfaces are stable.
Processing
Processing involves various steps that convert raw fluid into oil and gas. The first step is the separator, which separates oil, gas, and water. The lightest part, gas, rises to the top. Water, being denser, settles on the bottom and is drained. Oil is between gas and water in density. Workers collect the gas and oil and reuse the drained water to maintain reservoir pressure.
Transportation
The second phase is preparing oil and gas for transportation. Operators monitor oil treatment to remove water, vapor, and chemicals like hydrogen sulfide and carbon dioxide. During this process, operators remove chemicals like hydrogen sulfide and carbon dioxide. These chemicals are dangerous and require careful monitoring. For example, hydrogen sulfide is toxic, flammable, and explosive.
Optimizing profit margins faces challenges. Information gathering, equipment costs, worker management, and other issues hinder profits. Other challenges to profit margins include the following.
Data Control
The oil and gas industry faces complex information problems. Tracking details like pressure, temperature, and other sensors requires careful monitoring. On-site monitoring and data collection are often sporadic and disconnected from real-time operations. Incomplete information causes downtime to fix issues, reducing optimization. More dangerously, it can create safety hazards, such as fires.
Equipment Cost
Oil tank monitoring equipment is expensive. The estimated costs depend on the scope of the oil tank operation. Tank size matters, with larger tanks costing more. Oil field operations cost millions of dollars and are vulnerable to incidents and deterioration. When monitoring fails, equipment loss cuts profit margins.
Geographic Distance
Geographic distances make monitoring oilfield tanks and oil wells complicated for workers. Hazardous roads and long distances make consistent, regular monitoring challenging. Without regular information to inform decisions, optimizing profit margins relies on guesswork.
Harsh Environments
On-site monitoring requires going into harsh environments. Snow, sand, and water in oil field environments create hazards for equipment and workers. For example, snow can cause fluids in tank pipes to solidify. Cold weather wear and tear can cause blockages and equipment malfunctions, leading to breakdowns and delays. The human toll is hypothermia, frostbite, and other cold weather-related injuries.
Maintenance
On-site maintenance monitoring leads to equipment failures. With irregular monitoring, workers miss critical signs of damage to drilling rigs, pipes, and valves. Under federal regulations, at least one well test must be conducted during a calendar half-year for each producing completion. Six months may seem adequate for regulatory requirements, but equipment malfunctions can occur at any time.
Resources
A lack of information makes resource allocation difficult. Without oil well data, companies may tap underproducing wells or miss productive ones. Monitoring on-site yields infrequent data, leading to delayed or ill-informed decision-making. On-site monitoring also wastes human resources. Fieldwork to monitor wells strains work hours and stresses employees physically and mentally.
Safety
The 2018 oil rig explosion and fire outside Quinton, Oklahoma, that killed five people was the deadliest accident in the drilling industry since 2010, when eleven people were killed in the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster. Safety should be paramount in any oil rig monitoring situation. The alarms that would have warned about an impending blowout on the Oklahoma rig were turned off. Workers also ignored physical signs that large amounts of gas were being forced into the well. Monitoring is not about optimization, but rather human lives.
Security
Rising oil prices bring growing oil theft. Annually, stolen oil is estimated at $1 to $2 billion. Oil well theft cuts into profits and is dangerous. In one incident, thieves tapped into a pipeline maintenance station in Reeves County, Texas. Static electricity buildup, combined with high pipeline pressure, sparked a fire and explosion.
Tank monitoring is essential to ensure continuity and consistent quality during operations. Monitoring uses various instruments to check equipment and drilling functions.
Sensors and Instruments
Sensors provide information that affects equipment, environmental, and performance tracking. Temperature sensors measure temperatures in oil tanks and from oil tank processes. Temperature monitoring provides early warnings of potential leaks or blockages causing rising temperatures. Level sensors give liquid level readings. These prevent overflows that contaminate water and soil. Tanks and pipes that run dry can overheat, creating fire and explosion risks. Other sensors measure pressure, corrosion, and flow.
Data Acquisition
Acquiring information is vital during monitoring. Profit margins, the environment, and lives are at stake. On-site monitoring often fails to capture temperature, pressure, and other metrics fully. Remote monitoring provides the details needed for informed and timely decision-making.
Data Processing and Storage
Information acquisition is not useful on its own. It needs analysis and storage. Remote monitoring provides filtered, up-to-date data, which is stored for future reference to show oil field tank productivity. Storage is secure and available for designated users.
Reporting
Recording and reporting information with on-site monitoring leads to missing data. Collection methods are outdated, with manual data entry and monitor storage. Paper-and-pencil or other hand-held records are easy to lose. Remote monitoring uses automatic reporting, record-keeping, and alerts, so communicating results is easier.
Data
Processing slowly acquired information with on-site monitoring takes time and effort. Workers lose productive time that automated monitoring could free up. Information is not secure and is easy to lose with on-site monitoring. Data management is slow and tedious and lacks secure storage. Remote monitoring provides secure and immediate information for the rapid, informed decision-making needed to optimize profit margins.
Environmental Impact
Remote monitoring prevents environmental damage. Without on-site monitoring, workers lack the information that they need to predict and prevent dangerous incidents that harm habitat and wildlife. Oil affects plants and wildlife up the food chain. Oil-contaminated birds suffer lung, liver, and kidney damage. Predators like raccoons that feed on birds and their eggs accumulate ingested oil and suffer health problems. Humans who inhabit these same environments also suffer health issues. Remote monitoring spots issues early, helping avert environmental disasters and damage that has consequences far beyond profit margins.
Human Resource Use
Under on-site monitoring, workers must spend long hours in the field. Much of that time is spent traveling, doing manual tank checks, and working in harsh conditions. Remote monitoring reduces time spent checking oil tanks and traveling to sites and protects workers from hazardous environments and weather.
Safety
Regular maintenance is essential to avoid profit-draining downtime from broken equipment and catastrophic incidents. On-site monitoring with sporadic, reactive audits may miss broken and aging equipment and drilling conditions that lead to disastrous consequences. Remote monitoring offers consistent, twenty-four-hour watchfulness.
Security
In-person monitoring, with its sporadic schedule, cannot readily intercept theft. Additionally, the environmental cost is potentially dangerous, though the human cost is the most important consideration for remote monitoring. On-site monitoring puts workers in jeopardy from possibly armed thieves. Losing workers to violence is a greater loss than forfeiting any profit. Remote monitoring views and reports on oil tank sites around the clock. By alerting law enforcement, remote monitoring keeps sites secure without compromising worker safety.
Cost Optimization
Downtime affects profit margins by whittling away time and human resources. Disasters can hit profits hard through punitive regulatory action and lawsuits. Averting disasters through disaster intervention lowers costs by avoiding expensive legal action. Reduction in manual monitoring and intervention management lowers labor costs. Human resources are used to maximize worker productivity.
Remote monitoring helps boost profit margins through cost-cutting methods like worker management. Devastating incidents can also be avoided, sparing environments and lives. Companies can avoid punitive regulatory actions and lawsuits and can add these savings to their bottom line. While the final goal is profits, the greater expense is to the environment and worker safety when companies do not use remote monitoring.
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